Scott Bush

It’s New Year’s Eve, so I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on 2007*. I’d have to call it the Year of the Blog. (Well, at least on my blog I will.) I started blog­ging in earnest in 2007, though I had a cou­ple of cool posts back in 2005 and 2006 from an earlier—and aborted—blog incarnation.

Here are some stats from the YotB:

• 110 Posts Were Posted.
• 5 Pages Were Created.
• 57 Com­ments Were Posted.
• 21 Dif­fer­ent Nick­names Were Rep­re­sented In The Comments.
• 11 Links Were Added.

One hun­dred and ten posts! That’s around one every three or so days. Not bad. Thanks to all who’ve both­ered to read them. Hope they were enjoy­able. I’ll keep going in 2008, as I’ve found blog­ging gives me a chance to write, which I enjoy, and spout off about some crazy things, which I enjoy more.

I’ve also become a bet­ter blog reader, too. It’s great keep­ing up with friend’s via their blogs (though noth­ing beats a cup of cof­fee and actu­ally spend­ing time together). Check out my blog roll for a list of oth­ers’ blogs I read.

Have a happy and safe New Year!

* <shame­less plug>If you want a broader and more detailed reflec­tion, check out CrystalAndScott.com and read our Hol­i­day Report.</shameless plug>

As you may have read else­where on teh Intar­webs, we focused on home­made gifts this year. I’m pleased to report that our friends and fam­ily did as well. In addi­tion to receiv­ing a nice jar of hand-mixed chai tea leaves, brown­ies, a fam­ily tree, and hand-drawn cal­en­dar (from my 8-year-old neice), I received one of the best presents ever.

A wal­let.

Not just any wal­let: a duct-tape wal­let. Not just any duct-tape wal­let: an Apple duct-tape wal­let. My sister-in-law and her boyfriend Magic Joe pro­duced a present that exactly cap­tured me. I love duct-tape wal­lets (I’m on my fourth one in as many years) and I sure love Apple. Com­bin­ing the two into one hand­made gift was sure appre­ci­ated. (They also made a great check­book cozy for my wife: karate style!)

Thanks to every­one for their lovely and thought­ful gifts this year. And for not going nuts… this was the first year in a while in which the level of present-giving felt appro­pri­ate, not gluttonous.

Call me old fash­ioned, but isn’t adul­tery sup­posed to be a Bad Thing? Let’s assume that it is for the sake of argu­ment that it is (and if you dis­agree, I’d be inter­ested in know­ing why). With that mod­est stan­dard agreed upon, take a look at this Match.com ad I saw on some (non-adultery-advocating) web­site. (Red oval is mine, not part of the ad.)

Pro­mot­ing mar­i­tal infi­delity cer­tainly isn’t a hook I’d choose to pro­mote my busi­ness. But I’m not the mar­ket­ing direc­tor at Match.com, who appar­ently did choose adul­tery as the basis of one of their cam­paigns. I’ve searched for the phrase “It’s okay to look” but all I found were people’s blogs talk­ing about their dates (and one YouTube video of a cat). It seems I’m the only one who finds this odd.

Sure, I know that Match.com would tell you that it’s geared toward sin­gle peo­ple who are uncom­fort­able with the idea of online dat­ing because to some it car­ries with it a stigma that you can’t get a “real” date. (I don’t think that’s the case at all, per­son­ally. We shop, buy, pay bills, read news, and in some cases even vote online; why not meet peo­ple? Beats shout­ing at some­one over loud music at a club, right?) Telling these peo­ple that it’s okay to look gets them on the site with the mind­set they’re just see­ing what’s there. Next thing they know they’re signed up and participating–the ad did its job.

But that’s why the ad is insid­i­ous: its got that dou­ble mean­ing. Sup­pose you’re in a com­mit­ted rela­tion­ship, or even mar­ried, but unhappy. Rather than deal­ing with the root causes of that unhap­pi­ness, you decide it’s “okay to look” at sin­gles on Match.com. I’m the first per­son to advo­cate for per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity and that an ad can­not make you do any­thing you wouldn’t want to do any­way, but still. When I read that I see the mar­keters sit­ting around a con­fer­ence table espous­ing the extra ben­e­fit of the phrase appeal­ing to dis­sat­is­fied mar­ried people.

Am I read­ing too much into this? Prob­a­bly. What do you think?

‘Tis the sea­son, right? What does that mean to you? To me it means it’s the sea­son to care for one another, help those less for­tu­nate than our­selves (even more than the other 10 months of the year), and spend time cel­e­brat­ing the beauty of the win­ter­time, and share the com­pany of friends and fam­ily. Cliché? Maybe. But not if you mean it and put it into practice.

This year we’re opt­ing out of com­mer­cial Christ­mas. A catchy turn-of-phrase that describes the way we’re putting our idea of “’tis the sea­son” into prac­tice. Rather than take part in the shop­ping mad­ness (like santa’s lit­tle elves at left) and buy­ing many “things” for peo­ple because it’s just what we’ve always done, we took a dif­fer­ent approach: mak­ing a gift for each per­son on our list.

Sure, there’s things you can buy that are mean­ing­ful: dona­tions in their names to char­i­ties; prac­ti­cal gifts like gas cards or house­hold goods; and expe­ri­ences like gift cards to day spas or peti­c­ures. We’ve done that for the past few years (and will again in the future, I’m sure) but this year we’re tak­ing a stand against ram­pant consumerism.

It’s inter­est­ing how dif­fi­cult it is remain true to this prin­ci­ple. We talk about how we feel like we’re not get­ting enough stuff for our fam­ily and friends. It’s not that a hand-made gift doesn’t take effort and some money. But after years of buy­ing a “big present” for every­one, along with lots of “stock­ing stuffers,” it’s hard to feel that the item we thought about, bought materials/ingredients for, worked for days to com­plete, and wrapped is enough. Kinda proves the point about our con­sumer cul­ture run­ning rampant.

So, take a look at your habits this year (or next, as it is only a week or so until Christ­mas and much of the shop­ping is already done) and see whether the per­son you’re buy­ing for really needs it. We cer­tainly don’t expect much and have encour­aged our fam­ily not to “go nuts” on us; we’d appre­ci­ate any small gift or card and be con­tent that it was given as acknowl­edg­ment of love and friend­ship. Unless you’re buy­ing us iPhones; we really want those ;-)

Crys­tal wrote about this topic on our blog, www.CrystalAndScott.com. Check it out, if you’re not a mem­ber of a retail mar­ket­ing fed­er­a­tion or some­thing who believes this sort of think­ing is the end of world.

Recently I’ve expe­ri­enced some tin­gling and dis­com­fort in my right hand. Noth­ing to be alarmed about, as it’s hap­pened to me peri­od­i­cally over the years. Occa­sion­ally I’ll be woken by a very intense pins-and-needles/aches in my hands, but that’s prob­a­bly just from fight­ing all the dream nin­jas. But I men­tioned it to a guy who gives us company-subsidized mas­sages and he sug­gested I move my mouse from the right to the left side of my key­board. So I did.
It’s sur­pris­ing how good I am at it. Now, I’m no south­paw; I can barely scratch out my own name left handed. But I can type QWERT, ASDFG, and ZXCVB just fine (not to men­tion 12345) so I guess it’s not sur­pris­ing that after only a week I’m man­ag­ing decently. I was told it’d take two weeks before I’d be pro­fi­cient; per­haps I’m ahead of the curve? (On my Power­Book of course I’m still rely­ing on my right hand when “track­padding,” which is only slightly more of a bas­tardiza­tion than the term “mousing.”)

Last time I checked, when you wanted a book you bought or bor­rowed one. You never rented one. You didn’t have to; that’s what the library was for. So I had to check the date when I came across a story about Paper­spine in the busi­ness sec­tion of the Seat­tle P.I. a few days back—it had to be April Fool’s Day. But it wasn’t and this story is true: you can see it your­self.

Touted as the “Net­flix for books” by the wit­less writer, the story describes how a Microsoft project man­ager on leave started an online book rental com­pany. For between $10 and $25 a month you can have books deliv­ered to you in the mail, returned the same way in a postage-paid mailer when you’re done. I kept read­ing, look­ing for the bit where the writer would point out you can get books for free at the library. To my aston­ish­ment, the L-word was never men­tioned. Here’s a sce­nario I imagined:

Scene: a plush cor­ner office in a down­town high rise. A ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist in a pow­er­suit sits at his desk look­ing over a one-page busi­ness plan. Dustin Hub­bard, more casu­ally dressed (he worked at Microsoft, after all) is shown in.

VC — “Mr. Hub­bard, thanks for com­ing in. I nor­mally wouldn’t take the time to meet with you but I sim­ply had to know whether this” (he shakes the paper in front of him) “is true.”

H — “Oh yes! It’s like Net­flix, but for books! You can chose online, then we send–”

VC — “Yes, yes, I read it. I’m not an idiot; I know how it would work. Tell me, who’s your competition?”

H — “Well, the online book­sellers, Ama­zon and Barnes & Noble, are near our space but they’re not the pri­mary com­pe­ti­tion. We feel that tra­di­tional brick-and-mortar book­sellers are the real com­pe­ti­tion, but we have plans to—”

VC — “Wait, wait, wait. What about libraries. You can go in and get books for free, keep’em for weeks. Doesn’t cost a cent. Why would some­one actu­ally pay a monthly fee to get what they can have for free? Actu­ally, they already pay for it through taxes… why would they pay twice for books?”

H — “Uh… well, um, you see… in today’s busy world some peo­ple… like, uh, soc­cer moms and exec­u­tives, see… they can’t get to libraries. That’s it. So, they pay a small fee for the con­ve­nience of get­ting books deliv­ered. It’s a great idea! Like print­ing money!”

You can see my point. Sure, you could argue that it’s ben­e­fi­cial to not have to go to the library and browse, or that it’s con­ve­nient to choose books on a web­site when a library might not be open. But libraries are a cor­ner­stone of our demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, deliv­er­ing infor­ma­tion to every­one equally. Not to men­tion the com­mu­nity that’s fos­tered at a library: classes, plays, meet­ings, etc. If your life is so busy you can’t stop by the library to check out a few books then how in the hell are you going to find time to read them, even if they do come in the mail?

This is an exam­ple of what’s wrong with (some) peo­ple today. They’d rather drop $20 a month for the priv­i­lege to have rented books on their night­stands than to, I don’t know, say give $20 a month to lit­er­acy pro­grams. I’m all for entre­pre­neur­ial endeav­ors but I just can’t get behind this one. Oh, and real­ized that this hare-brained idea has been tried before (appar­ently with some suc­cess) at bookswim.com and booksfree.com.